[rsync]

"Really glad to see this write-up. I love my current PiHole setup, but replicating it for family/friends (especially with my blocking so many sites they might want) hasn't seemed doable."

A few things ...

First, you can make pihole-like DNS ad-filtering available to everyone you know by using nextdns.io as your DNS and (basically) moving your pihole into the cloud. It's a tremendous product and I wish I had thought of it.

Second, aren't all of these things (pihole / nextdns) already obsolete ? Browsers (like firefox) are enabling DoH by default and devices in your home as well as apps on your devices are going to migrate to DoH as well.

Unless there is a solution I am missing I fear that we had a brief golden age where properly configured ad-blocking, via DNS, was a simple and useful solution but now that's falling apart ...

[zinekeller]

> Browsers (like firefox) are enabling DoH by default

If you are using a filtered DNS, there is a domain (use-application-dns.net) that you add to tell Firefox to not activate it (unless if the user explicitly activated it). It's already included in Pi-Hole, and some hosts list includes it (despite Firefox prioritising hosts list before DoH).

Plain-text DNS are redirectible (technically a hijack, but whatever).

Ironically, I think that most IoT devices will be the one with hard-to-shut-off DoH/DoT: even worse, they have the incentive to develop a proprietary protocol for ads, so the next step-up would be IP blocklists. Or, I dunno, just hostage your device if you don't allow internet connectivity.